The order of words can create disorder

Shubham Jain
Sep 7, 2018 · 3 min read

In this post I talk about how by putting in a little thought to how you phrase your sentences you can control your brand’s perception, its status and use it to better market it to your ideal demographic. How to use it, to project your brand as a luxury one, or as an inexpensive one.

Reliance Jio came in with a bang, it took the entire industry heck the entire country by a storm. As far as I recall, it offered 1 gigabyte (GB) of data for just ₹10 (16 cents). I remember saving ₹100 so that I could purchase a 100 megabyte (MB) 2G data for my vacation. Those days were finally gone. You can probably imagine the scene at the boardrooms of all major telecom players, they were frantic, their future looking bleak. There was no other way to compete with Jio but to slash prices themselves.

Now I am pretty sure, the marketing guys over at Vodafone saw this is as a wonderful opportunity to gain goodwill amongst its customers and stop them from jumping ship. It immediately slashed its prices to ₹25 a gigabyte. Pretty impressive. Even more impressive is the way the chose to communicate this to the customers.

Well the first and the obvious way is to just blurt it out directly. I am sure Vodafone would have been like, “Yeah, guys because Jio is offering it for virtually free, we gotta do the same, so here it is, 25 bucks a GB, have fun!” Which they did, they ran this advertisement for the middle class. No matter what you say, us middle class people like cheap things. Expensive products repel us. So when someone comes to me and says there is something available for ₹25, I would buy it at the blink of an eye. So all is good right, what’s the trouble?

Well you are forgetting our upper middle class peeps, who are the real spenders. They don’t like cheap things, they like expensive things at a discount. They can’t go around saying they are wearing a dress that just cost them ₹500, they however can very proudly boast they are wearing a ₹5000 dress at 90% discount (if they can do the math). That is how their mind is wired. So our smart guys at Vodafone came up with a solution to this. They advertised it as, “Buy 1 GB at ₹250, get 9 GB free!”

Isn’t that just wonderful, it is exactly the same things, but how it changes the entire perception of the brand. While the former suggests a cheap brand, the latter an upscale brand. While a middle class man would have shunned away the advertisement at the sight of ₹250 without even reading further, the same would have happened with an upper class lady who would have skipped an advertisement that was selling something for ₹25.

It is through phrasing that you can, control your brands perception, its status and use it to better market it to your ideal demographic.

-Shubham Jain

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Daily encounters with brands

    Shubham Jain

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    Daily encounters with brands

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